This year’s ranking of SetSquared by the UBI Index as the top university business incubator in Europe, and second in the world, has left the SetSquared team a little awe-struck. Many of the incubators we most admire in the world are with us, shoulder to shoulder, on ‘Global Top 25’ list and we realise that it our collective responsibility to harness this expertise to make a serious, positive impact on our global and local innovation economies. This is no time to rest on our laurels – the recognition begs the question: ‘Where do we go from here?”
Fortunately for SetSquared, that is not difficult to answer – we’re an ambitious team and now plan to build on our strengths to grow new opportunities.
When I took over as Innovation Director for the Partnership earlier this year, I wanted to focus on business acceleration and ensure that SetSquared continues to build on its reputation as the best university business incubator in Europe. Europe’s shared business culture and the pressing requirement for publicly-funded research to provide a better return on investment makes it essential that all highly-rated universities work together on this agenda. SetSquared has some international experience here having forged links with a number of high-tech companies in Italy through our 3-year Entrepreneurship Programme relationship with Turin’s Fondazione CRT and previously run a very successful US-UK Science Bridge with San Diego.
Now our top ranking in the UBI Index will allow us to build on this experience and partner with other like-minded university business incubators, particularly in Europe. By partnering in this way we aim to expand the pool of entrepreneurial talent and enable corporate partners and investors to work with a richer and larger network of high growth companies. I also hope that this will set the benchmark for eventual collaboration and partnership with leading university business incubators in the United States and Asia.
One area where we are hungry for international partners in the SetSquared’s Open Innovation programme. Initially funded by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO), we have now attracted more corporate partners, including Barclays Corporate, Johnson & Johnson, Buro Happold, CGI Group, Airbus and Ericsson. These companies are all committed to building open innovation relationships with knowledge-intensive SMEs and start-ups. This Programme can be even more successful if we can make it available to other European university business incubators, increasing the number of companies we can introduce to corporate partners and, in so doing, making the programme even more attractive to new corporate partners.
SetSquared’s ambition for growth in incubation members is still grounded in a desire to see more high-growth companies created in the UK. I know the difference these successful tech startups can make to local economies by bringing high value jobs and prosperity. We want to make SetSquared’s services available to many more entrepreneurs and start-ups across the South of England and are partnering with Local Economic Partnerships to make this happen. The impact of offering SetSquared services will be significant and it will substantially increase the portfolio of innovative companies we work with from the 200 currently in our incubator and make SetSquared even more attractive to corporate partners and investors.
So the future for SetSquared is about growth and opening our services to more companies in the UK and internationally. To achieve this we are looking forward and reaching out to like-minded partners with whom we can work, strive and thrive together. University business incubation is not a ‘solo’ sport, the power of collaboration creates reciprocal benefits far beyond anything that we could achieve alone.
